While teaching IGCSE Literature, I wanted to give my grade 9 students a broad yet deep understanding of the historical and personal contexts in which Shakespeare's Macbeth was written. I had also realized that many students had weak paraphrasing and summary skills, so behold the "Para-Pres" assignment.

In this project, I photocopied and cut up the sections from Stephen Greenblatt's introduction to the Norton anthology of Shakespeare's tragedies. You could use any college-level scholarly introduction. Each section is between 1 and 3 pages. For my highest-level students who needed a challenge, I also added one full-length critical article, Greenblatt's "Renaissance Self-Fashioning."

On the first day, I gave the students their assigned jigsaw reading sections in pairs. Their first goal was to create a poster, using note-taking and paraphrase skills. Their second goal was to give a poster presentation on the main points of their context area.

In order to check the paraphrasing work, students had to create a draft before making the final poster. This involved a lot of me running around the room, checking individual passages against the original and getting students to rewrite.

See below some of the finished presentation posters, which were then recycled to make a classroom bulletin board for reference during the Macbeth unit. You can use this assignment with any jigsaw reading. Here's an editable version of the Para-Pres rubric. Make a copy and make it your own! You will see that the majority of the points in this rubric go toward the writing and creating the poster, and only 20% is on presentation skills. Adjust the weight of each category or add specific presentation skills if you want to prioritize the oral presentation aspect of the assignment.